From Bavaria With Love!

For most marine journalists, a boat show is a lot like a giant shopping expedition, except that you only fantasize about buying stuff…you don’t actually haul off and follow through. So while Power & Motoryacht’s Editor-in-Chief George Sass Jr. and I strolled the docks this past February, enjoying the festivities that were part and parcel of Miami Beach’s Yacht and Brokerage Show, it’s quite understandable that one of us (I disremember which) would make the following fantasy-driven, boat-nut-in-the-presence-of-a-pretty-boat suggestion, “Hey let’s check out this baby—see what the state of Bavarian boatbuilding is these days.”

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The ‘baby’ being referred to was the 360 Sport Coupe (shown above) from Bavaria Yachts USA, the stateside rep for Bavaria Yachts of Giebelstadt, Germany. Bavaria Yachts, as you may already know, bills itself as the single, largest yacht production facility in Europe. The company’s been manufacturing sailing boats since 1978; its finely detailed powerboats have come along a bit more recently.

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At any rate, you can see for yourself what ensued via the short video that’s included here. There is one caveat worth noting, however, and it’s wholly necessitated by my own highly excitable nature, especially when given a new and rather attractive vessel to look at.

The glitch in the video has to do with the propulsion system for the outdoorsy little 360, with its Swiss-Army knife array of features, roomy two-stateroom layout, and more windows in the saloon than your average greenhouse—while doing a pre-production review of the video I discovered that I had wildly declaimed at one point, “Wow, IPS!” After all, there was a Volvo Penta IPS joystick at the helm.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

While the device I was declaiming about was indeed a Volvo Penta IPS joystick, it was synched into a set of Volvo Penta stern-drive units on this particular 360, not a set of Volvo Penta IPS pods, which, by the way, are more expensive than the stern drives but also offer smoother, more authoritative dockside maneuverability. At least in my opinion.

And hey, we’re truly sorry we haven’t actually sea trialed the Bavaria 360 Coupe at this point and therefore can’t provide actual test data here, but you never know. The model George and I examined in Miami came from a whole whopping fleet of German-built beauties, all of them Florida-based, so presumably a pricey ticket to Weiner-schnitzel-land would not be required for a test drive. From Bavaria with love, eh?